Brain Scans Uncover Hidden Patterns of Thought That Predict Learning More Accurately Than Test Scores

Introduction

Transfer from Spatial Education to Verbal Reasoning and Prediction of Transfer from 5 Learning-Related Neural Change

The traditional tests and grades educators have long used may measure learning less accurately than scans of the brain, according to a new study published in Science Advances. The paper, authored by a team of researchers from seven universities and led by Georgetown neuroscientists, could not only upend how educators craft curricula but reveals a hidden link in the human mind.

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"For a long time, psychologists and philosophers have debated whether spatial thinking, like mental images of objects, is hiding underneath thinking that seems verbal," explains Adam Green, the study's senior author and Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor at Georgetown College of Arts and Sciences in the Department of Psychology. "If this is true, then teaching students to improve their spatial thinking skills should boost their verbal reasoning ability."

The researchers studied a "spatially-enriched" science course offered at public high schools in Virginia that emphasizes spatial thinking skills, like building maps and planning how cities can be reconfigured to reduce energy consumption. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans showed changes in students' brains as they learned the course curriculum. These changes were compared to how learning is traditionally measured (e.g., changes in test scores).

The brain changes were far better predictors of learning, especially a kind of learning called "far transfer," which is so deep that it helps students succeed at tasks they weren't even taught to accomplish. Far transfer is a holy grail for educators and is notoriously difficult to capture with traditional tests.

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Making Models in the Mind

The team's findings support Mental Model Theory, or MMT, which posits that when humans comprehend spoken or written language, the mind "spatializes" this information, relying on systems in the brain that originally evolved to help our primate ancestors nimbly navigate complex environments.

When the researchers tested verbal reasoning about words in sentences rather than objects on maps, they found marked improvements in the students who had taken the course emphasizing spatial thinking. What's more, the better students got at spatial thinking, the more their verbal reasoning improved.

"These findings demonstrate that mental modeling could be an important basis for far transfer in real-world education, taking skills from the classroom and applying them more generally," says lead author and Psychology Ph.D. student Robert Cortes (C'18, G'23). "This study informs our understanding of how education changes our brains and reveals key insights into the nature of the mind."

"Verbal reasoning is one of the most powerful tools that human evolution has produced," Cortes argues. "It is fascinating to combine neuroscience and education to understand better how the human brain learns to reason. Hopefully, we can leverage these findings to improve human reasoning more broadly."

Showing new evidence for MMT in the brain, the research team found that improvements in verbal reasoning could be best predicted by changes in centers of spatial processing in students' brains -- specifically in the posterior parietal cortex.

Creating Curriculum for the Cranium

While the debate about mental models has a long history, one of the hottest debates in the modern educational landscape is whether neuroscience can improve teaching and learn in schools. Though promising in theory, efforts to integrate neuroscience with education have proved challenging in the real world. One of the major obstacles is that neuroscience tools, like MRI scans, are expensive and time-consuming, making it unlikely that they can be applied at a large scale in education policy and practice.

"We can't scan every kid's brain, and it would be a terrible idea to do that even if it was possible," says Green, who is also a faculty member in the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience.

Critics have long expressed concerns about whether the data that neuroscience provides can tell educators anything they couldn't find using traditional paper and pencil or computer-based tests.

The research team's new findings point to a new way of integrating neuroscience with an education that helps to overcome these challenges. Instead of focusing on each student's brain, the study focused on the curriculum the students learned. The results show that brain imaging can detect the changes that come with learning a specific curriculum in real-world classrooms and that these brain changes can be used to compare different curricula.

"Curriculum development can and does happen at the kinds of small scales that neuroscience can realistically accommodate," Green says. "So, if we can leverage neuroimaging tools to help identify the ways of teaching that impart the most transferable learning, then teachers and school systems can widely adopt those curricula. The curricula can scale up, but the neuroimaging doesn't have to."

Students in the spatially-enriched curriculum showed more robust brain changes compared to closely matched students who took other advanced science curricula. These changes appear to indicate deep learning of spatial abilities that the brain can apply in highly flexible ways, which traditional tests of specific skills may not fully capture. In particular, the study's finding that brain changes can predict learning better than traditional tests provides strong evidence that the inside view afforded by neuroscience can give educators insights about far-transfer learning that they have long sought but that traditional learning assessments often miss.

According to Cortes:

"This study is a great example of our department's mission of bridging 'Neurons to Neighborhoods' through science. We hope to use this data to convince policymakers to increase access to this spatially-enriched education."

About the Study:

Additional study authors include Emily G. Peterson, American University; David J. M. Kraemer, Dartmouth College; Robert A. Kolvoord, James Madison University; David H. Uttal, Northwestern University; Nhi Dinh, Georgetown University and Johns Hopkins University, Adam B. Weinberger, Georgetown University and University of Pennsylvania; Richard J. Daker, Georgetown University; Ian M. Lyons, Georgetown University; and Daniel Goldman, Georgetown University.

The authors report having no personal financial interests related to the study.

The research described is partly supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) grants DRL-1420481, EHR-1661065, and EHR-1920682. It was also supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.

Attribution/Source(s):

This peer reviewed publication was selected for publishing by the editors of Disabled World due to its significant relevance to the disability community. Originally authored by Georgetown University Medical Center, and published on 2022/08/13 (Edit Update: 2024/08/05), the content may have been edited for style, clarity, or brevity. For further details or clarifications, Georgetown University Medical Center can be contacted at georgetown.edu. NOTE: Disabled World does not provide any warranties or endorsements related to this article.

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Cite This Page (APA): Georgetown University Medical Center. (2022, August 13 - Last revised: 2024, August 5). Brain Scans Uncover Hidden Patterns of Thought That Predict Learning More Accurately Than Test Scores. Disabled World. Retrieved December 5, 2024 from www.disabled-world.com/disability/education/mental-model-theory.php

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